For example, we say that A has a
fortune of $1,000,000. The impression is at once conveyed of a considerable
degree of wealth, but it is rather from the fact that that fortune
represents an annual income of $40,000 than, from the actual magnitude of
the fortune itself. The number 1,000,000 is, in itself, so greatly in
excess of anything that enters into our daily experience that we have but a
vague conception of it, except as something very great. We are not, after
all, so very much better off than the child who, with his arms about his
mother's neck, informs her with perfect gravity and sincerity that he
"loves her a million bushels." His idea is merely of some very great
amount, and our own is often but little clearer when we use the expressions
which are so easily represented by a few digits. Among the uneducated
portions of civilized communities the limit of clear comprehension of
number is not only relatively, but absolutely, very low. Travellers in
Russia have informed the writer that the peasants of that country have no
distinct idea of a number consisting of but a few hundred even. There is no
reason to doubt this testimony. The entire life of a peasant might be
passed without his ever having occasion to use a number as great as 500,
and as a result he might have respecting that number an idea less distinct
than a trained mathematician would have of the distance from the earth to
the sun. De Quincey[50] incidentally mentions this characteristic in
narrating a conversation which occurred while he was at Carnarvon, a little
town in Wales.
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